far not managed to emerge from the shadow of the republic, which by now was functioning competently, if without any special brilliance. It sometimes seemed as if the nation were at last ready to make its peace with the republic, to accept the gray dullness of Weimar and be reconciled to the ordinariness of history. The Reichstag election had, it is true, revealed a degree of disintegration going on in the bourgeois center, as manifested by the rise of many splinter parties. The Nazi party, moreover, could now count 150,000 members. But at the beginning of 1929 the Bonn sociologist Joseph A. Shumpeter spoke of the “impressive stability in our social conditions” and concluded: “In no sense, in no area, in no direction, are eruptions, upheavals or disasters probable.”
But Hitler understood things much more keenly. In a speech given during this brief happy period in the history of the republic, he remarked on the psychology of the Germans: “We have a third value: our fighting spirit. It is there, only buried under a pile of foreign theories and doctrines. A great and powerful party goes to a lot of trouble to prove the opposite, until suddenly an ordinary military band comes along and plays. Then the straggler comes to, out of his dreamy state; all at once he begins to feel himself a comrade of the marching men, and joins their columns. That’s the way it is today. Our people only have to be shown this better course—and you’ll see, we’ll start marching.”39
He was waiting for his cue. The question was whether the party could preserve, over the long pull, its dynamism, its hopes, its conception of its aims, and its image of the chosen leader—the whole system of fictions and credulities on which it was founded. In an analysis of the May, 1928, elections Otto Strasser had complained that “National Socialism’s tidings of redemption” had not caught the ear of the masses and that the party had failed to make any inroads into the proletarian circles. In fact, the party’s following consisted chiefly of lower-grade white-collar workers, artisans, some farm groups, and young people inclined to romantic protest—the advance guard of those classes of the German population who were especially susceptible to the rousing music of “an ordinary military band.”
Only a few months later, the scene had totally changed.
IV. THE TIME OF STRUGGLE
From Provincial to National Politics
Following our old method, we once more take up the struggle and say: Attack! Attack! Always attack! If someone says we can’t possibly have another try, remember that I can attack not just one more time but ten times over.
Hitler launched his first massive offensive against the consolidated system of the republic in the summer of 1929, and at once his advance carried him a long way. He had long been in search of a slogan that could mobilize the masses. Suddenly, Gustav Stresemann’s foreign policy offered a breach into which he could hurl the full weight of his propaganda. The debate over reparations had broken out afresh, and Hitler mustered all his energy to move the NSDAP from its role of isolated sectarian party and propel it into the limelight of national politics. By good luck his campaign coincided in time with the world-wide Depression, and derived its psychological impact from economic conditions. This gave him the opportunity to test his forces, his organization, and his tactics in a kind of prelude. The struggle that raged around the reparations question brought on the crisis that was to grip the republic to the very end, a crisis initiated by Hitler and cleverly fomented until the republic broke down.
Strictly speaking, the point of departure came with the death of Gustav Stresemann at the beginning of October, 1929. The German Foreign Minister had worn himself out trying to put over his subtle foreign policy. Branded as a “compliance policy,”[9] it actually aimed at gradual abrogation of the Versailles Treaty. Until shortly before his death Stresemann, though with considerable doubts, had backed the reparations arrangements drafted by a committee of experts under the chairmanship of Owen D. Young, the American banker. The Young Plan represented a distinct improvement on the existing conditions. Moreover, thanks to Stresemann’s obstinacy and diplomatic adroitness, it had been coupled with the promise of the Allied occupying forces evacuating the Rhineland before the date stipulated by treaty.
Nevertheless, the agreement encountered vehement opposition inside Germany. It even disappointed many of those who had a clear view of the Reich’s predicament. For there was an element of cruel mockery in having Germany undertake obligations for payments extending over nearly sixty years when she did not even have the first few annual payments at her disposal. Two hundred and twenty notables of economics, science, and politics, among them Carl Duisberg, of I. G. Farben, the theologian Adolf Harnack, the physicist Max Planck, Konrad Adenauer, then mayor of Cologne, and former Chancellor Hans Luther, issued a public statement expressing their great concern. It would appear that the many conciliatory gestures had been a mere front; eleven years after the war, the Young Plan exposed the merciless attitude of the victors toward the vanquished. What was more, the plan once again adverted to the war-guilt clause, Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty, which had earlier inflicted such wounds to the nation’s self-esteem. With payments continuing until 1988, the Young Plan was fundamentally unrealistic, and the radical nationalist groups were able to make effective capital out of the phrase
On July 9, 1929, the radical Right united to form a national committee for a plebiscite to reject the Young Plan. They staged a wild and vehement campaign (joined by the Communists on the extreme Left) that never let up until the agreement was eventually signed nine months later. The issue brought together a strange assortment of associations and interdependencies whose differences were temporarily forgotten in favor of a few hypnotic slogans. These, endlessly repeated, tried to concentrate hatred upon a few sharply etched images of the enemy. The plan was described as the “death penalty on the unborn,” the “Golgotha of the German people” whom the executioners were “nailing to the cross with scornful laughter.” Along with this the “Nationalist Opposition” demanded annulment of the war-guilt clause, the end of all reparations, immediate evacuation of the occupied territories, and the punishment of all cabinet ministers and members of the government aiding and abetting the “enslavement” of the German people.
The committee was headed by privy councillor Alfred Hugenberg, an ambitious, narrow-minded, and unscrupulous man of sixty-three who had served as settlement commissioner in the East, had been a director of the Krupp Company, and finally had built up an intricate and far-ranging press empire. In addition to an extensive list of newspapers, he controlled a news agency and UFA, the motion picture company. As the political liaison man of heavy industry, he also had sizable sums at his disposal. This money he deliberately committed to undermining the “Socialist Republic,” to smashing the unions, and to answering “class struggle from below,” as he put it, with “class struggle by the upper class.” A short, rotund figure with a mustache and close-cropped hair, he looked like a pensioned-off sergeant posing for a martial photo, not like the proud and embittered patrician he wished to be.
In the fall of 1928 Hugenberg had emerged as a dark horse and assumed leadership of the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (the German Nationalist People’s Party). He promptly made himself the spokesman of radical resentment. The Right had been slowly warming toward the republic; but under Hugenberg’s control all such signs of rapprochement abruptly came to an end. Both in methods and in some points of its program, the DNVP began copying the Hitler party. It never succeeded in being more than the bourgeois caricature of the Nazis. Still and all, Hugenberg broke all limits in his battle against the hated republic. The first signs of the world-wide Depression were beginning to be felt in Germany; but during the storm over the Young Plan, Hugenberg warned 3,000 American businessmen, in a circular letter, against granting credits to Germany.2 Under this leader, the German Nationalists quickly lost something like half their membership. But this made little impression on Hugenberg; he declared coolly that he preferred a small block to a large pulp.
